When the USAF acquisition directorate chose Brazil’s Super Tucano to outfit the Afghan air force over rival Hawker-Beechcraft’s AT-6 offering, howls could be heard from Wichita all the way to Sandy Eggo.
I guess somebody heard them:
The U.S. Air Force said Tuesday it would set aside a contract awarded late last year to Sierra Nevada Corp. to supply planes to Afghanistan’s military, a surprise move that may reopen the contest to rival Hawker Beechcraft Inc.
The Air Force also said it would launch an investigation into the contract to deliver training and light-attack planes to Afghanistan, worth $355 million…
The contract award, announced in late December, had been seen as an important win for Brazilian aircraft manufacturer Embraer SA, which teamed up with Sierra Nevada to offer a fleet of Super Tucano single-engine turboprop planes.
But procurement of the Afghan warplanes became a politically charged issue. Hawker Beechcraft, the product of a 2007 leveraged buyout by Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Onex Partners, filed suit in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims after the Air Force excluded its proposed design, the Beechcraft AT-6. The Wichita, Kan.-based company and its supporters also played up potential U.S. job losses as a result of its exclusion.
“While we pursue perfection, we sometimes fall short, and when we do we will take corrective action,” said Air Force Secretary Michael Donley, in a statement Tuesday. “Since the acquisition is still in litigation, I can only say that the Air Force senior acquisition executive, David Van Buren, is not satisfied with the quality of the documentation supporting the award decision.”
The Super Tucano is a more mature product, and therefore has lower initial acquisition risks. But Hawker Beechcraft has the advantages of secure logistics lines, which prevents sustainment of the aircraft from being subjected to foreign pressures. All this before you get to the issues of outsourcing one of our few areas of unquestioned industrial dominance and the domestic jobs that goes with it. Where the USAF pooched the deal is by excluding the AT-6 from the competition without telling the vendor why their bid had been denied a chance to compete.
I suspect you’ll see more of this, with more defense contractors grappling for a slice of a smaller defense budget.
of course the afghanistan government is not paying for this, the taxpayer is, so buy american. last time i checked brazil did not contribute funds or troops to that little corner of the world.
I wouldn’t want to depend on Brazil for spares, either.
Tucano’s a good airframe but if they are P.O.’ed at US,
you got problems..
Are there any parts of the Super Tucano that we cannot make domestically? I’m no aeronautical engineer, but it doesn’t look like this is a terribly esoteric airframe.
This crap needs to stop. This is the second time an Air Force procurement has been delayed due to poor losers. Have any of the other branches suffered this? As far as I’m concerned everyone in Air Force procurement should be fired (cannon optional, but preferred).
Hmmmmm. Comanche? Sgt York Air Defense System? Navy Area Defense Missile System? LCS? Marine One Presidential Helicopter?
I could go on, but my fingers are getting tired.
You missed the F-35 – joint FAIL there.
Most of the procurement processes in DOD are messed up. Air Force’s fails are really starting to tick me off specifically, but as you point out there is fail to go around. AF is one service stuck in a larger problem that would (IMHO) best be fixed with LESS regulation, LESS bureaucratic morass, and FEWER federal workers involved in the process.
To be clear, I was referring to the winner announced => loser complains => competition reopened pattern we’ve seen here and with the KC-X. Our procurement system has enough problems without the losers wrapping themselves in the flag and crying to Congress. As it stands Hawker Beechcraft has probably ensured they’ll win a contract that will get canceled as soon as we leave Afghanistan, which will probably happen before any planes roll off the line. Good job.
Jeff, in both cases questionable choices were made, not to mention the challenge of selecting a foreign vs. domestic supplier.
To my knowledge, the only reliable foreign supplier we’ve had is Great Britain.
In both cases the supplier was to be domestic. The EADS-Lockheed KC-X was going to be built in, IIRC, Texas, while the Super Tucano was to be built in Florida. Yes, there are possible foreign choke points further up the supply chain, but picking a company with US headquarters doesn’t guarantee we’re free of those. The only way to ensure our freedom from foreign influence is to put domestic sourcing in the contract, and EADS and Embraer are as capable of that as Boeing and Hawker-Beechcraft. All other things being equal, I would much rather have a small amount of money go overseas than a larger amount staying in the US.
Now, to answer the point you raised below, if the AT-6 was improperly excluded from the competition I have no problem with the reopening. What I want is why it was improperly excluded, who is responsible, and what their punishment is going to be.
The conversion work on the A330 airframes was to be done in the US, but the airplanes themselves would have come from Tolouse.
Personally I’m in favor of buying American whenever possible. It’s not like we lost out when we procured the KC-46.
CSAR-X: Boeing won and then it got called back. I can’t remember why.
My thought? When Afghan pilot rolls it hot with danger close, and pickles with physics to kill our/NATO troops (ref; two dead inside a.ministry building), what will ee do?
This crap needs to stop. This is the second time an Air Force procurement has been delayed due to poor losers. Have any of the other branches suffered this? As far as I’m concerned everyone in Air Force procurement should be fired (cannon optional, but preferred).
CSAR-X ring a bell? Not to mention taking delivery of Block 30 Global Hawks straight to Davis-Monthan while buying GH Block 40s. And they resist oversight; oh, how they resist.
TC
Above and beyond this specific procurement issue….When we *do* acquire a weapons system from another country, we should protect ourselves against nondelivery based on political grounds (which I believe actually happened with some JDAM parts during the Iraq war) by including in the contract a very stringent liquidated-damages clause, secured by assets which are within US jurisdiction.
I would simply require they make it here. Not assemble from parts shipped from Brazil, but make the whole thing here. Everything down to the smallest rivet in the thing is. made. here.
No need for any sort of special liquidated damages, or any other measure.
It used to be that vendors didn’t bother to protest a contract. You would lose, and it gave you a bad reputation for future contracts. But these days, there aren’t enough vendors to blackball…so they protest EVERYTHING. And the program managers tie themselves into knots trying to evade a successful protest. Including doing things that ultimately hurt the warfighter.
My own opinion is that a protest should require a specific criminal allegation…and in order to file, you have to put 10% of the contract cost up as escrow. As a “program get well” fee.
Perhaps there are merits to the many protests, but most seem like pure partisan b!tching by guys who lacked a sharp enough pencil to submit a winning bid the first time.
What say that in the event of any protests, the whiners have to carry out the mission at their own cost commencing IMMEDIATELY on submission of the protest until it s resolved.
I mean, who the heck is going to deliver ordnance on target, or provide refueling or VP ASW for the years or decades while the lawyers, accountants and politicians engage in endless bickering. Our current tools are worn out, and incompetent idionds keep delayhing their replacement endlessly until they are no longer affordable, and cutting the numbers bought until the unit costs are also unaffordable.
It’s not like there are wars to be won or deterred or anything important.
Thank goodness we delayed the soonest possible deployment in support of troops getting shot at to resolve this most critical issue. Hopefully it will take so long to resolve that the need will have passed. Might lose a few extra troopers, but it is worth it to get it exactly right…whatever that is.
My buddy flew the Super Tacano at Pax NAS. He loved it and thought it was an amazingly superior CAS platform. He was quite excited to see it get out there operationally. I imagine he is a bit peeved right now. It is cheap, effective and could be fielded almost immediately providing CAS for the ODAs, Teams and other units out there. But, hey, politics is more important than the lives of troops.
Just a thought, but multiple countries have licensed built multiple jet platforms from the US the last 40 or so years. Why not just build them here?
To those complaining about the complainers. Wouldn’t all of this had been avoided if the Procurement group openly stated that Hawker-Beechcraft was eliminated because of X, Y, and Z?
I mean they were basically told to sod off without any particular reason. I go through a vendor selection process for enterprise applications and I had better damn well be able to articulate in an exact manner why the winner was selected, and why the loser was rejected.
I think the taxpayers (including Hawker Beechcraft) are owed at least that much.
DING! DING! DING! DING!
I was about to comment that this was the first time I had read that the AT-6 had been “disallowed.” Up until now I was under the impression that the choice had been made based on a free competition between the two designs.
That is where I believe that USAF Acquisitions Commands have stomped on their crank. They are visibly manifestly unjust and not following the rules for free and open competition and in these lean times companies that would once just wince at such chicanery now invite the Competition Advocate and their members of Congress into the fray. The USAF and their idiot/moron MDA on this project have only themselves to blame. Same as with the tanker replacement where they were forced to fire the MDA and send her to jail for taking bribes.
Some people have trouble keeping up. IIRC the only Chief of Staff fired lately was USAF. The only Secretary fired lately was USAF..ok, and DOD. It appears that these guys need to be hit with the clue stick all the time or they lose focus.